NFL

There aren’t many sports events that take two or three days–or weeks or months–to fully digest and analyze…

When even the most amazing/surprising things occur, we usually watch, discuss over a few hours, and then just move on to the next thing.

The Raiders getting approval from NFL owners to move to Las Vegas… is not one of those fleeting moments.

It’s a historical pivot point for Bay Area sports–and for the NFL.

It’s going to take some time to move onto the next thing, and it was Marcus Thompson II’s good idea that we should just open things up for a special “TK Show” episode.

So we put together a pop-up round-table conversation among Marcus, myself, columnist Mark Purdy (who is on site for the owners meetings in Phoenix) and ace BANG Oakland reporter David DeBolt (who was the first reporter to get Roger Goodell’s killer final letter to Oakland a few days ago.

Brent Barry doesn’t just give lip-service to the use of advanced stats to analyze the NBA, he is an outright proponent–as you hear right away in this conversation.

Some retired players aren’t as, shall we say, interested in analytics. At all. Not even a little bit.

But Barry, who wrapped up a 14-year NBA career in 2009–including a key stint with the Spurs towards the end–says he was always trying to be the most efficient player he could be, which led naturally to him seeking out statistical evidence.

Also: Those 14 seasons and two NBA championships with the Spurs, the 1996 Slam Dunk Championship…

He also brought up a very new, very deep-level statistical category: “Crap load.” As in: Kawhi Leonard is good because the Spurs have a crap load of victories.

This, of course, isn’t an exact list–only Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch (and maybe Jed York and Paraag Marathe) know the order of the 49ers’ quarterback wish list and they’re not telling me.

This is a guess, an estimate, an attempt to look at the 49ers’ blank slate QB situation, peer into the minds of Shanahan and Lynch, and, given what we know or can reasonably extrapolate, try to place the available or almost-available names in some level of precedence.

I do this stuff to try to think along with the decision-makers, to give myself a baseline as the plot twists and the situation moves along…

And maybe to figure things out maybe a step or two behind the guys doing the actual evaluations.

Yesterday, I wrote about Shanahan and Lynch’s inherent and implied leverage here–they have the security of new six-year deals, they have zero commitments to any QBs (and in fact zero actual QBs on the roster) and they can either wait it out for a year or jump right into a major QB deal or feint at both things while negotiating the whole time.

But, though Shanahan and Lynch have the contract security to slow-play this, if they’d like, there is some outside urgency created by today’s start of the free-agent open house.

I’m on vacation this week, so you know the drill–no columns, no blog-items, very few Tweets, no new podcasts…

That is, unless something massive happens in the Bay Area sports universe, and I would be just fine if nothing does.

There was a run there when something large happened just about every time I took a day off, but the 49ers, Raiders, A’s, Giants and Warriors have recently and unexpectedly moved away from that tradition, which is just fine by me.

Jim Harbaugh had a point to make, and it was a good one: If you look at all the coaches the Yorks have run through in their 17 seasons as 49ers owners, the one tenure that stands out is…

Harbaugh’s four-season run from 2011-2014, and not just because of the winning.

(Though he obviously has won more than any coach in the York ownership reign. By a lot.)

As Harbaugh joked, he probably deserves an “endurance medal” for lasting four full seasons under Jed York.

That’s longer than any of the seven coaches who have coached for and been fired by the Yorks, starting with Steve Mariucci, the incumbent when they took over, all the way to their recent hiring of Kyle Shanahan (who is their eighth full-time coach).

Yes, this the third annual “TK Show” appearance for Jim Harbaugh, who basically (literally?) made this show from the start and is welcome to come on at any time.

Today, Harbaugh was at home in Ann Arbor–as he has been for most of this winter, even through recruiting–after his wife Sarah gave birth to his son John, who was born about seven weeks premature.

You can definitely hear a more vulnerable side of Harbaugh when he talks about the experience.

We also of course talked about his frantic first two seasons at Michigan, his recent tweaking of SEC media maven Paul “Pete” Finebaum, and the pain (and promise) of being so close to the playoffs last season.

Oh, we talked about the 49ers, too, of course, and the highlight was Harbaugh noting that he lasted four seasons under the current ownership–the longest any of their 7 coaches (previous to just-hired Kyle Shanahan) have survived.

“Maybe there should be an endurance medal, a courage medal for that,” Harbaugh joked.